Last Days in a Dutch Hotel (from Literature and Life) eBook

Queens in, and a bareheaded, bald-headed dignity of
military figure backed up the stairs before them.
I would not rashly commit myself to particulars concerning
their dress, but I am sure that the elder Queen wore
black, and the younger white. The mother has one
of the best and wisest faces I have seen any woman
wear (and most of the good, wise faces in this imperfectly
balanced world are women’s) and the daughter
one of the sweetest and prettiest. Pretty is the
word for her face, and it showed pink through her
blond veil, as she smiled and bowed right and left;
her features are small and fine, and she is not above
the middle height.

As soon as she had passed into the concert-room, we
who had waited to see her go in ran round to another
door and joined the two or three thousand people who
were standing to receive the Queens. These had
already mounted to the royal box, and they stood there
while the orchestra played one of the Dutch national
airs. (One air is not enough for the Dutch; they must
have two.) Then the mother faded somewhere into the
background, and the daughter sat alone in the front,
on a gilt throne, with a gilt crown at top, and a
very uncomfortable carved Gothic back. She looked
so young, so gentle, and so good that the rudest Republican
could not have helped wishing her well out of a position
so essentially and irreparably false as a hereditary
sovereign’s. One forgot in the presence
of her innocent seventeen years that most of the ruling
princes of the world had left it the worse for their
having been in it; at moments one forgot her altogether
as a princess, and saw her only as a charming young
girl, who had to sit up rather stiffly.

At the end of the programme the Queens rose and walked
slowly out, while the orchestra played the other national
air.

VI.

I call them the Queens, because the Dutch do; and
I like Holland so much that I should hate to differ
with the Dutch in anything. But, as a matter
of fact, they are neither of them quite Queens; the
mother is the regent and the daughter will not be
crowned till next year.

But, such as they are, they imparted a supreme emotion
to our dying season, and thrilled the hotel with a
fulness of summer life. Since they went, the
season faintly pulses and respires, so that one can
just say that it is still alive. Last Sunday
was fine, and great crowds came down from The Hague
to the concert, and spread out on the seaward terrace
of the hotel, around the little tables which I fancied
that the waiters had each morning wiped dry of the
dew, from a mere Dutch desire of cleaning something.
The hooded chairs covered the beach; the children played
in the edges of the surf and delved in the sand; the
lovers wandered up into the hollows of the dunes.